Romania buys 2 million Covid-19 tests from South Korea

Romanian state company Unifarm, the contractor that purchases medical equipment and materials for the state healthcare sector, has signed a framework contract with a South Korean producer for purchasing 2 million molecular diagnostic tests (Real-Time PCR) for the new coronavirus (Covid-19), the Strategic Communication Group announced on Sunday, March 22.

The first batch, consisting of 200,000 such tests, will arrive in Romania next week.

Romania has recorded 433 confirmed Covid-19 infection cases by Sunday, March 22, at 13:00. However, only about 10,000 tests have been processed so far and the authorities’ strategy has been to test those who showed Covid-19 infection symptoms if they also presented other risk factors, namely if they had traveled to another country recently or if they had been in contact with infected people or people who have returned from other countries recently.

However, over the weekend, the number of confirmed infections has been growing at a higher pace and the intra-community transmission of the virus has become a certainty, which means that the authorities will likely increase the number of tests in the next period. Moreover, the authorities have also asked private medical services providers to process Covid-19 tests, whereas, in the beginning, only a few state hospitals carried out such tests.

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